


cry baby

by Anonymous



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Child Abuse, Child Sexual Abuse, Dubious Consent, F/M, Gen, Grooming, Hurt Number Five | The Boy, I reiterate: grooming, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Non-Consensual Kissing, Non-Consensual Touching, Number Five | The Boy Whump, Pedophilia, Rape/Non-con Elements, also I'm partial to Five whump so, five is 15, it turns out i uncovered some memories and uh, there is no rape in this story, vent fic, win win - Freeform, writing is my best coping mechanism lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:01:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29703045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Five has been alone for two years when The Handler swoops in, with red lips and sharp teeth and wandering hands.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy & The Handler (Umbrella Academy)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 55
Collections: Anonymous





	cry baby

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings for: Pedophilia, grooming, non-consensual kissing and non-consensual touching. There is no rape in this story, it is just the kissing and touching.
> 
> I just want to say that I don't want this to be read as making light of the topic and such. Vent fic, and whatnot. 
> 
> Five spends two years in the Apocalypse here.

Hunger is gnawing at him again.

It’s been three days since he’s eaten anything. His stash is completely depleted and it’s the middle of summer. Travelling is hard. He doesn’t have the energy or strength to spatial jump far enough to get food and then jump back - and it doesn’t matter anyway. He’s hardly had the energy to spatial jump since he arrived in the apocalypse and his powers were completely wrung dry. 

The sun bears down on him relentlessly. He has to take constant breaks in the shade and he’s drinking more water than he can afford to. He was drinking more water than he could afford to. He’s run out, now.

The summer in the apocalypse is a hundred times more intense - all of the weather is. He hates travelling in the extremes and tries his best to avoid doing it, but, like a fool, probably delirious from heat, hunger and thirst (why ever did he think this was a good idea?) he left his base to search for food. 

And now he’s far from his base, with his water miles away from him, and food still nowhere insight, and the heat is making his head fuzzy.

Stupid. He was so, so stupid. 

He stops for the night in the ruins of a building that looks like it burned down. At least the ashes have been blown away, though a faint grey dust still coats his clothes when he lays down. He needs to make a plan - he should have made one, or at least a better one, before he ever left. 

For now, though… he just needs to rest for a little while. Another stupid decision, he’ll think in the future. Once he lays down he can’t get back up. He falls asleep amongst the ruins of the old house and when he wakes up, he can’t stand. His mouth is painfully dry and his head feels thick and muddy like a swamp. The world around him blurs into an indistinguishable mess and he can’t make anything out of it except for the thirst in his mouth and the pounding behind his eyes and the fire beneath his skin. 

No matter what he does, neither the thirst nor the fire fades or abates or goes away; neither does the pounding headache, or the way the world has turned into a watercolour mess around him. It gets brighter and hotter and then it gets darker and marginally less hot and his lips crack when he moves his move, and then. Then there are… footsteps.

The sound cuts through the silence of the world like a gunshot, and even in his muddled state Five can’t overlook it. He listens as the footsteps get closer, and closer, and closer to him, and then there are a pair of perfect red heels in front of his face. He thinks of Mom, and home, and then he thinks about how everyone is dead and that he should be trying harder to do better and get back to them.

A thud makes him flinch. A briefcase drops onto the floor by the heels, and then there’s the swoosh of a dress - a blessed breeze on his overly hot skin - as the person, the woman, crouches down.

“Well, you look as if you need some help,” says the person. It takes a moment, but Five forces his eyes up.

The woman has blonde hair and red lips, as red as her shoes and as red as blood. She’s grinning down at him. When she sees him meet her gaze, her perfectly plucked eyebrows raise a little and she extends a gloved hand. 

“Nice to meet you, Number Five. I’m The Handler. I’m here to help.”

* * *

He joins the Commission.

It seems like the best thing that he can do, even if Delores isn’t happy about it and even if he has to leave her behind. He has spent two years in an apocalyptic wasteland and has no sign of his powers working to bring him back home anytime soon. The Commission, however, does, and with a greater chance of not letting him die before he gets home.

For the first week, however, he is confined to a hospital wing as people tend to him and his myriad of ailments. It takes a couple of days for his brain to reform itself from the puddle it had been, but he remembers, in those days when everything was a blur, the way manicured nails would run through his hair and along his forehead in a motion that so painfully reminded him of Mom.

When he’s in better condition, he’s shown around and actually told what he’s expected to do. Killing people is nothing new. A five year contract as a time-travelling assassin, and then he will be free to go home. It seems easy. 

The people he’ll kill are always going to die anyway - if not by him, by someone else. It doesn’t matter. He has to do this to get back to his family. He just tries not to think about it too much - tries not to think about anything too much. That quickly becomes his life in the Commission - drifting through, doing what he’s told, and never thinking too much about it; justifying everything with the knowledge that this is the only way he can get home. Reassuring himself that he just needs to get through this to get home.

The Handler likes him. The Handler really likes him. She visits him often and calls him to her office often; they have lunch together often, and she drops by during his training and his classes just to watch him. It’s unnerving. There’s something in Five’s gut that twists whenever he turns and she’s right there, staring at him with a shark-tooth grin and a glint in her eyes; whenever she lays a hand on his shoulder, or his back, or his knee, or runs it through his hair.

And then there’s the other part of Five that thrives with the attention and craves even more of it.

Five is fifteen years old. He is the youngest person in the Commission, at least to his knowledge. The people around him look at him like he’s stupid. Like he’s just some silly, stupid little kid, and he has to prove them wrong. He has to do better - _be_ better - than everyone else here and when The Handler shows approval in him, he preens. 

It’s not unlike the Academy, really, but all of his attempts at gaining approval or affection from his father were always pointless. Even when Five hated his father the most, he always wanted his approval. (It’s the reason he ended up in the Apocalypse in the first place.) He never got it, and he knows he never would have no matter what he did.

But here is The Handler. Pride shines in her eyes when Five scores the highest in training and she never shies away from showing him her approval and affection, and there’s all the other adults around him that he loves to prove wrong and antagonise, or prove wrong and gain their begrudging respect, and he thrives under the attention more than he would ever admit to. More than he even realises.

He doesn’t need approval, or affection, or respect. But he craves it. He craves it from the lack of it that he got in the Academy, and he thrives with it from being so young and surrounded by adults who think they’re better than him just because they’re adults, only for them to be wrong. He’s better than them. He knows it, and The Handler confirms it after each test and each training session with a hand on his shoulder and a grin on her face.

And then there’s one session that Five messes up in. 

It’s a stupid mistake - all he does is make stupid mistake - and it costs him, and the failure makes him shaky and furious. He has lunch after training with The Handler, like most days, in her office. She seems disappointed in him. It makes him feel sick. This is the first time she’s ever been disappointed in him. 

He doesn’t manage to eat much and even The Handler seems disinterested in her food. After a couple of bites, she cleans her teeth with a toothpick, takes a candy from the bowl on her table, and reapplies her lipstick. 

“You’ve had perfect results thus far,” she comments with a sigh, not looking up from her little makeup mirror. 

“I know,” says Five. “It was just this once.”

“The Commission hires incredibly skilled people. We have to, of course; when interfering with the delicate strands of time, we can’t have anything less than perfect.”

“I know.”

“It would be catastrophic,” she continues. “If we sent unskilled, untrained agents out into the field. And, of course, these results remain on your record. This can affect opportunities you get in the future; promotions, job opportunities, benefits.”

She shuts the makeup mirror with a _snap_ and sets it down. Her gaze is sharp and intense as she turns it onto Five. “But, Five, I like you. I see something in you.” She leans forwards, that familiar grin coming back onto her features, and says, low and conspiratorial, “I think you could be the best thing the Commission has had. And I want the best for you, Five. So, I have an idea.”

Five’s curiosity jumps. He can’t help but lean forwards a little. Maybe he could pick up some extra training to make up for today?

The Handler is pleased by his reaction.

“I can talk to them,” she offers. “See if, perhaps, the time they got for you was a little… wrong. They might have just misrecorded it, after all, and they just need to be reminded to fix it.”

“You… want to lie and change the time,” says Five, blinking slowly. The Handler raises an eyebrow.

“Five, you’re the best. You know you are. Is it a lie to make sure your records reflect that?” she asks, eyebrows knitting together. And Five… can’t really argue with that. He is the best; his records, beyond today’s slip up, are proof of that. 

The Handler grins. “But, Five, I’m sticking my neck out for you. For good reason; I know what you’re capable of and I want to see you thrive here, but nonetheless it is still a risk on my part, so all I want is a little in return.”

That’s fair, Five thinks, and he’s not sure he would have expected any less from her. She probably just wants him to do her less interesting jobs, or some paperwork, so that she doesn’t have to bother.

“Alright,” he agrees. “What is it?”

The Handler’s grin, impossibly, widens. “I knew you wouldn’t disappoint,” she says. “Stand up for me.”

She does, and so does he, expecting to follow her somewhere. All she does is walk around her desk and stand by his side. She puts a hand on his shoulder, her thumb rubbing circles on him. Her hand moves to Five’s cheek, and his stomach does something funny at the touch, his body torn with the need for the affection he’s become accustomed to and the sudden twist his guts do. It’s too easy to overlook the latter in favour of the first.

And then The Handler leans down and kisses him.

Five goes very, very still.

A flash bang goes off in his brain. Everything turns to static and white noise but just as it fades, just as the _wrong wrong wrong this is wrong_ starts screaming at him, The Handler pulls away, lips sliding against his, and smiles.

“I’ll go talk to your trainer,” she tells him, letting go of his cheek. “You should finish your lunch, Five.”

She leaves him in her office and she goes to do what she promised him, and Five finishes his lunch in a bit of a daze. His mind does loops each time he tries to logically think about what just happened and he finds it easier to just not think too much about it. 

Anyway, his shock wears off by the night, mostly. It was just a kiss, he tells himself. The Handler sees herself as some kind of mentor to him, almost like a mother, and was it really that dissimilar to the same affectionate kisses Grace used to give him on his forehead or his cheek when he was younger?

He tries not to think about it. 

It was just a kiss, he decides, and leaves it at that.

And anyway, it turns out he got the best timing in training that day.

* * *

The Handler is a touchy person. She likes to place a casual hand on people’s shoulders, or backs, or knees, or cheek; it’s just the kind of person she is, like how Five is just the kind of person to avoid touch when he can. He was never all that touchy as a kid and two years of complete isolation made his social skills a little rusty, and now he’s at the Commission where the only people around him are adults who are trained to kill. He doesn’t want to touch any of them.

The Handler is only an exception because it’s different with her. She’s his mentor, and she’s just affectionate, and it’s not a big deal.

The kisses only happen when she needs to do something for him, or if he’s done something particularly well. He might not enjoy it, but it’s always relatively quick and it means he’s doing something right. In a twisted, roundabout way, he almost looks forward to it, at the same time that his heart won’t stop pounding and his palms sweat and his mind goes blank and still in the way the world settles in the aftermath of an explosion. 

It’s normal now, to go back to her office for lunch, or after training. He had an exam today though, and he hasn’t seen her all day. It’s late now. He could go to bed and not see her. He doesn’t want to see her. His stomach won’t stop doing flips and he hates how unsteady he feels. He hates that he doesn’t want to see her and he hates that a part of him really does; that stupid part of him desperate for approval and praise that he can only get from her.

He tells himself that she’s his mentor. After an important exam in his training here, he ought to go visit her. She’ll be waiting for him.

She is waiting for him, of course.

“I’ve been expecting you any time now,” she says when he enters. She’s smoking. She gestures to him to sit down and offers him a drag of her cigarette. When he refuses, she shrugs and nudges her bowl of candy towards him, and watches while he eats. The sugar doesn’t help the rolling of his stomach.

“I’m sure you’ve done perfect, of course,” she says. “We’ll get your results soon. You’ve been moving so fast, it’s incredible. I’m trying to move you up a few stages - your training and exams will be harder, sure, but you won’t have to waste your time on the easier stuff, and sooner than you know it, you’ll be getting your first job! And, of course, I know you can handle it. You’re so smart, Five.”

And, like always, Five preens and all of a sudden the anxiety and nausea and dread is worth it all. 

She talks to him, and as she speaks she makes her way around the desk inch by inch, until she’s suddenly right in front of him and leaning back against it and breathing smoke in his face. For a moment, she falls silent, just staring down at him and taking a long, heavy drag of her cigarette. Ash falls from the tip of it and onto Five’s knee. 

She kisses him, red lips against his, and smoke stings his nose and burns his throat and makes his eyes water, so he closes them. She holds his bottom lip between hers and it’s just a kiss, like every other kiss she’s given him. Her hands hold onto his jaw, just forceful enough that his brain itches, and when her tongue dashes out across his lips, he can’t flinch away. 

She holds his head in place and strokes her fingers along his jaw, her manicured nails scratching along his skin, and his lips part out of shock and because it hurts to breathe through his nose due to all the smoke around his head, but The Handler sees it as an invitation.

A flashbang goes off again. He tastes smoke and peppermint and his skin crawls on his skeleton as if it doesn’t quite fit right. He’s still when The Handler pulls back and it takes him a moment to be able to open his eyes. He’s greeted by The Handler’s glimmering eyes and smirk. Her hand moves to his cheek and she runs her thumb along his skin, and her sharp nail is just close enough to his eye to make him flinch. Something slips down his cheek, wet, and she swipes it away. Of course, the bitter smoke made his eyes tear up. 

The Handler rises to her feet and ruffles his hair. “Go get some rest,” she tells him, and he goes back to his own room and brushes his teeth, but no matter how much he brushes them, his mouth still feels dirty. He stops when he rinses his mouth out for the third time, and he thinks about the kiss and the feeling of a tongue against his own and he retches. 

He brushes his teeth again and goes to bed. It’s just a kiss, he tells himself. 

That night, he dreams of his siblings, buried beneath rubble. 

It becomes more common after then, for her to kiss him like that. She always laughs at his expression afterwards. 

_“You shot a man today,”_ she says, _“without hesitation, but you look as if you’ve seen a ghost if someone kisses you.”_

It shouldn’t get to him, but it does. It does, and then he thinks of weakness and lectures and the apocalypse and dead siblings.

He takes out the turmoil of his emotions in his training. When they bring strangers in and supply him with tools and tell him to torture, he tortures. He gets the highest score. 

“You’re ruthless,” says The Handler, pushing his hair from his face. There’s still blood beneath Five’s nails. Apparently there’s some on his shirt collar too, because The Handler fingers the material and tuts. “You’re turning out exactly as I thought you would.” 

She runs her fingers along his jaw.

“You’re doing so well.”

Her lips ghost by his ear; her hand rests on his shoulder like a weight.

“I always knew you would do me proud.”

Her fingers rest on the curve of his neck. There’s a small stain on her dress, Five notices. He can’t look up and meet her gaze, so he just stares straight ahead. She’s taller than him - he hasn’t grown since the apocalypse. Probably due to the malnutrition he faced. With how close she is, and the heels she wears, Five’s eyes are level with her collar bones. Five wishes, suddenly, that he wasn’t so small, wasn’t so young. 

“I saw something in you, you know,” hums The Handler. “In the Apocalypse. You were so determined to survive; to get back to your family.”

Five wishes he had never time travelled. Five wishes his family were here now.

But if they were, they would see him frozen and tense and torn up inside and weak. 

He’s sure Luther, big as he was when he saw his body in the apocalypse, their Number One, would not be frozen right now. 

But when Five tries to move, his body doesn’t cooperate with him, and his mind is a muddled mess of _wrong wrong wrong_ and _it’s just a kiss she saved you you’re the best._

It’s best not to think, he decides. It’s a relatively new skill he’s gotten; the ability to be able to empty his mind completely. He used to hate such an idea - what was Five without his mind? - but now he finds it a blessing. 

The Handler kisses his cheek once, then twice, then again, then his jaw. There’s sharp static beneath his skin and his brain itches. It almost feels a bit like he did when he travelled to the apocalypse, a leap too far through time, his body a jumbled mess of atoms, buzzing and stretched thin across nothingness, stretched to its limits and then a little further.

Lips dance across his neck, over his pulse - he wonders if she can feel it race - and she grazes her teeth across his skin and they feel too many and too sharp. 

Idly, Five notices that there’s a rifle hung up on her wall. It looks like the one that Dad used to use.

* * *

Five kills his first person - for the Commission - near his birthday. He thinks. Time doesn’t work properly in the Commission’s HQ. He has no idea how old he is, except that he spent his fifteenth birthday with Delores, hiding from a storm.

It’s his last test, supposedly - or one of the last ones, whatever. The Commission is never straightforward with him.

There’s blood under his nails, and in the calluses of his skin, and in his hair. There’s a faint ringing in his skull - the screaming had been loud. But Five will have his first assignment with a briefcase in a few days, and to have his hands on one of the briefcases is a tremendous step forward in getting back home.

He goes back to his room. He smells smoke before he sees her, sitting upon his bed, creasing the sheets. There’s a single cupcake with a single little candle on it, lit and flickering, on a plate on his nightstand, accompanied by a bottle of champagne and two glass flutes.

“I’m going to be honest with you, Five,” she says. “I didn’t know you had such a temper. Really. Now, I know that was not your first kill ever, but it was a tremendous one, really. I want to see that side of you more. You’re so timid around me, Five.”

“Timid,” Five echoes. He bypasses her for the ensuite. The blood on his hands is dry and flaking apart. The Handler follows him into the bathroom and leans against the doorway.

“Yes, timid,” she snorts. He turns the tap and sticks his hands under the water. “Anyway, congratulations on such a fine kill. You should be proud of yourself. If you were anyone else, you’d still be practicing your theory. You’re moving onto the field soon.”

“Yeah,” says Five. He can’t get the blood off his hands. 

“Oh, you can be more enthusiastic than that, Five,” she tuts. She pushes herself off the doorway and wanders over; she turns the tap off and rubs his hands off on a towel, then uses her grip on his wrist to guide him back into the bedroom. Five scowls at the way his feet just follow her. 

She has him sit on his bed as she pours two glasses of champagne and hands one to him, then she sits next to him, her hip pressed to his. She crosses one leg over the other and her foot rubs his leg.

“I don’t like champagne,” he says. The Handler screws her nose up.

“Well, I’m sure you can like it for one night,” she says. Five presses his lips together and stares at the glass. She takes a sip from hers and quirks an eyebrow so, begrudgingly, he drinks his. The Handler starts a random stream of chatter that, despite himself, Five is swept away in it. He blames it on the champagne and the way she praises his recent training. 

She keeps their glasses topped up. The champagne seems never ending. It distracts him from the blood still on his body and his clothes and he can’t hide the smirk on his face when she compliments him or when she talks about future missions, that old pride rearing its ugly head. 

By the time the champagne is done, his head feels light and his legs unsteady. The Handler takes the glass from him and sets it aside. She’s laughing at some joke she made that Five didn’t catch. Her hand is on his thigh and he doesn’t know how long it’s been there for. 

“Oh, I do so look forward to the rest of your career here with us,” she sighs. Her hand idly rubs his thigh and Five pushes the sensation down through the cloudy layer of alcohol to ignore it. She’s just a touchy person. 

Her hand wanders around, stroking his thigh and then moving to rest on his shoulder and run down his arm, moves it to clasp around his neck. Her fingers twirl in the hair on the nape of his neck and all the while she keeps up a steady stream of conversation. Five’s mind bounces between being unable to focus on anything but her touch, and managing to make nothing of it as he makes noncommittal responses.

“Your cheeks are so red,” she laughs. “And here I thought I should perhaps bring two bottles for us to drink.”

“I’m only fifteen,” he murmurs. He doesn’t know the day. Is it his birthday? He wonders if his siblings are living through their birthday right now, at some points in time. 

“Huh,” says The Handler. “I guess you are. You’re so mature for your age, it’s easy to forget.” 

He can’t quite tell if that’s a compliment or not. If it’s a good thing or not. He would have prided himself on it without hesitation not even a year ago.

Her thumb runs along his cheek, her eyebrows knitted together in thought. “And what a fine man you’ll grow into one day, Five. It’s almost a shame.”

He doesn’t have much time to wonder what she means by that before she leans in and kisses him again. His body goes through the familiar motions of - _flashbang - tense - freeze -_ but he’s almost used to it, now. He doesn’t quite go into shock like he did the first time she kissed him, he just readily detaches himself from the sensations and lets her do what she wants. He’ll panic once it’s done and he’s alone, but he’s used to that, too.

It’s a bit easier with the alcohol, too, as if it’s not really happening, and he’s gone from the situation for a moment, for a while. He wonders if he could drift away from it every time it happens, and then he feels guilty because The Handler likes him and is only showing affection, and then his stomach does that strange thing again as if it’s imitating the writhing of the Horror with his intestines, and then he’s suddenly very aware of the top button of his shirt being undone. 

“You’re so filthy, Five,” she tells him, a mocking lilt to her words. “All this blood all over you. Your shirt’s ruined.”

The next button is undone, and then the next, as Five blinks. He can see the dark eyeshadow on her eyelids, the faint glimmer of makeup on her cheekbone; can feel her breath against his lips, wet and burning from her own, and he can feel the scratch of her nails against his skin as she undoes his shirt.

“What-”

“Shhh,” she says. “Your shirt’s filthy, Five. I’m taking it off for you; it needs to go in the washing.”

She’s right, of course. He can feel where the blood has stiffened the fabric; can feel it still on his hands, in his hair. There had been so much blood, and he had done it all. 

“Stop,” he says, as she undoes the last button. It comes out quieter and more hesitant than he intended it to be. Does he really want her to stop?

Her hands rest on his stomach and then slide all the way up his chest, coming to rest upon his bare shoulders. Five’s whole body jerks at the touch. The hands on his shoulders shrug his shirt off until it catches in the crook of his elbows and pools around him on the bed. He can’t bring himself to put it back on. It needs to be washed. There’s lips on his neck and hands on his chest and the room is cold and Five’s head feels as if it isn’t connected to his body. 

At some point, he stopped hugging Grace. He can’t say when. He thinks he was probably never an overly affectionate child anyway. He doesn’t think he was ever uncomfortable when she touched him, either - or when any of his siblings did. He was uncomfortable with affection, but not touch, because he was mature and didn’t need any of that because it made him feel as if he was dependent on others. 

And then he was gone too quickly to ever get over it and hug his siblings or mother again (and now they’re dead) and now his brain can’t quite tell if he wishes he had hugged them once more if he wishes no one would ever touch him again. Which doesn’t make sense, he thinks, with more force than he should, because nothing wrong has happened to him to make him feel such a thing. 

Who is he, Five Hargreeves, who time-travelled to the end of the world, whose mother was not pregnant the day she gave birth to him, who can control space and time when he doesn’t burn his powers to shit trying to be better than he is, to say what is normal and not - what is right and wrong? Especially when it’s The Handler, who saved him, who tutored him, who has given him this opportunity to eventually get back to his family; who does this to show him she likes him, and is proud of him. And doesn’t Five like that?

The Handler takes the empty bottle and glasses with her as she leaves, and Five showers. There are smudges of red dotted around his torso, too light to be blood. He scratches until there are no more stains on his skin and his skin is bright pink and he can feel it again, and then he brushes his teeth three times, throws his shirt into the trash can in his room and he goes to sleep, feeling too tired to try to stay awake any longer. He dreams of his siblings celebrating their birthday, and Five is not there to celebrate with them.

He throws himself into his work, and every spare minute is spent writing calculations to get home. He drowns everything else out but the work, shoves it all deep down within himself to deal with later, whenever that is, and the only sign that anything beside work ever happens is when his kills get a little too violent. 

* * *

He does not see The Handler for a while. He gets too busy. He still sees red lips and shark’s teeth when he closes his eyes and feels lips against his and hands on his chest when his mind is too quiet and not distracted. The time spent without seeing her was torn with immense relief and the twisted urge to see her again. 

He hates the way she touches him. He hates the way she shows affection; the way she tells him she’s proud of him, but he can go nowhere else to get the praises that a part of himself craves and that a part of him is hooked on. He thinks about the thirteen year-old who dove head first into an apocalypse for praise and approval and attention and he thinks that he’s finally getting it. 

When he’s seventeen, or sometime around then, he seeks her out of his own accord. His stomach does that weird thing it always does as he knocks on the door to her office. The room smells like smoke and there’s still that same bowl of candies on her desk. 

She grins, too many teeth, too sharp, and he knows how they feel against his neck, and when she touches him it takes a weight off his shoulders and puts a new one on. The relief feels like bliss for the second it lasts, and then the static comes back in his veins and his mouth feels like it’s coated in tar and he hates himself and wishes it felt as good as he wants it to; as good as he wants to believe it can. It’s a cycle, craving something that he hates so much, sugar-coating it to himself and building himself up to it only to crash the moment after he has it. 

He takes a new assignment the next day. It’s a fairly simple thing; kill a killer, save someone else who will go on to do something that will create a ripple in time, a small domino effect. Except his target is a teen boy, maybe a year or two younger than Five, with brown hair and a fire in his eyes that very nearly hides the uncertainty and fear he’s feeling, even when he laughs and cheers and yells and insults people. 

A simple bullet between the eyes takes the boy out. Five doesn’t look back. He hears the body hit the floor and he only feels angry. Nothing else matters, he decides, beyond his work and getting back to his siblings, and the anger that keeps him going. When phantom hands haunt him and red lips taunt him in his dreams, he turns to anger to push it down and push himself forwards. 

It’s stupid, he thinks. That childish need for approval and attention that’s managed to twist his life into a mess. He can’t conjure up anything besides anger at the thirteen year-old who ran into an apocalypse, and it’s not the same stupid, needy child that’s going to get himself back home. Five buries that child in his head and never gives him a second thought.

**Author's Note:**

> I just want to say that I don't want this to be read as making light of the topic.
> 
> Anyway, I can't be the only one that got immensely creepy vibes from The Handler in s1 with Five, right? Maybe that's just her vibe.


End file.
